Toward an omnipoetics: From an interview in Rampike magazine

NOTE. The following posting inaugurates the appearance of Poems and Poetics as a section of “commentaries” for Jacket2. The blog/journal as such has been active on the internet for almost four years now & will still be viewable at the old blogger site. In its new presentation I expect, among other things, to continue it as a platform for the presentation of an outsider anthology-in-progress & to launch a discussion of that omnipoetics that I see as the most ambitious & still unrealized thrust of many of our lives & works as poets & readers. That I have no ready definition of either outsider poetry or omnipoetics (among various ongoing concerns) is surely one of the lacks that keeps me going. (J.R.)

Editorial Associate & Confidant: Amish Trivedi

[The following is an excerpt from a recent interview by Karl Jirgens in Rampike magazine (University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada): “Omnipoetics & Ethnopoetics: Talking with Jerome Rothenberg,”. In the course of being questioned about the international/intercultural implications of works like TechniciansoftheSacred & PoemsfortheMillennium, I hit on “omnipoetics” as yet another attempt at pinning down what many of us had been pursuing with more or less success over the last several decades, & more. The ideas embodied in the word are matters I would care to pursue still further over the years to come. (J.R.)]

KJ:InTechnicians of the SacredyoucoveredarangeofpoeticexpressionfromAfrica,America,Asia,EuropeandOceania.Youhaveinvestigatedinternationalpoeticexpressionincluding,Futurists,Dadaists,Surrealists,Objectivists,Beats,Languagepoets,aswellastheViennaGroup,Cobrapoetsandartists,ArabicTammuzipoets,newConcretePoets,postwarJapanesepoets,ItalianNovissimiandAvant-Guardia,ChineseMistyPoets,aswellastheoralpoetictraditionsofmanyIndigenouspeoples.Whichdiscoveriesin approaches tolanguagesystemsandmodesofexpressiondidyoufindthemostexcitingasyoumovedthroughyourresearch?

JR:I’m enough of an ongoing avantgardist to prize the unanticipated above all else, and early along I found that coming at me from all directions. The oral and sometimes the written or visual traditions of indigenous peoples offered analogies to what was experimental in our own time – also to what was long accepted, I might add – and sometimes surprised us with forms of languaging for which there was no quick or easy comparison. An immediate example – really a wide range of examples – would be the use of non-semantic vocalizations: from untranslatable vocables and glossolalia in religious practice to forms of scat singing – whether called that or not – on a secular level. I was drawn to these – like Khlebnikov (zaum) and Schwitters (ursonata) before me – as full blown instances of traditional sound poetries, but also as targets for what I came to call and to put into practice as “total translation.” Gestural poetry (both aboriginal and as a part of contemporary deaf [signing] culture) led into largely unexplored areas, as did the transfer of language into other than vocal modes (whistles, yodels, drums, etc.). Aleatory (chance) practices and oulipo-like procedures showed up in Yoruba and Chinese oracle bone castings or in forms of Hebrew numerology (gematria) – resembling but different and markedly more developed than our own still tentative experiments. And there were notable instances of what could be read as visual or concrete poetry, to say nothing of the countless dream works and visions that linked to the most surreal-obsessed workings of the last century or two. The excitement of first coming on these works and then assembling or collaging them into books like Technicians was more than enough for a lifetime.

KJ:ThefirsttwovolumesofPoems for the Millenniumcoverarangeofinnovativeandoftenradicalliteraryexpressionsfeaturinginternationalpoetrypresentedinawaythatde-centresandre-historicizesmoreconventionalviewsofTwentiethCenturypoetics.ThethirdvolumeofPoems for the Milleniumcoverspoetry,manifestos,prose-poetry,verbalandvisualinnovations,aswellaswritingfrombeyondEuropeofferingethnopoeticperspectivesthatextendoutsideoftraditionalwesterncanonicalperspectives.Ithinkthatbynow,readerswillhaveunderstoodthatinVolumeThree,youwereinterestedinshowinghowtheRomanticsinspiredinnovativemodernistandavant-gardewritingthatfollowed.CouldyousayalittlebitaboutyoureditorialphilosophyandmethodologyinseekingoutcodesofwritingfromtheRomanticperiodthatyoufeltledto radicalinnovation?

JR:What we had to overcome was our own prejudice against fixed forms in order to see anew the challenges to form and content that were set in motion by the romantics and a number of others who had preceded them. As a matter of nomenclature Jeffrey Robinson and I began to talk between us about “experimental romanticism,” although I’m not sure that that phrase came into the actual writing. With that as our target, experiment and transformation appeared both in aspects of romantic writing that were largely subterranean and, even more surprisingly, at the heart and core of the romantic project. An aspect of this, from my side at least, was that the romantics and those we called the postromantics began to feel like contemporaries, less magisterial figures and more like fellow poets with whom we could enter into a free and easy discourse. In large part, if this doesn’t sound too arcane or academic, we rode on Jeffrey Robinson’s recovery of the “fancy,” salvaging it from Coleridge’s otherwise brilliant and long-lived dichotomy of fancy and imagination. The two terms – fancy and imagination – have otherwise been historically synonymous, whereas Coleridge made imagination not just the shapingspirit but a binding spirit that reconciled and thereby froze deep conflicts of image and idea, in relation to which “the fancy” might now be viewed as a liberatory force – for play and invention – the field par excellence of the experimental and visionary. I would then think of imagination qua fancy less in Coleridge’s sense as reconciliation and closure than in Keats’s and Rimbaud’s as uncertainty and openness. This seems clear in Keats’s definition of “negative capability” followed immediately by his criticism of Coleridge: “Several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously--I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason – Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge.” Or Whitman in an equally famous passage: “DoIcontradictmyself?Verywell then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes).” That being said, I would as well speak of imagination as of fancy, the good-of-it being, always, in the meanings, not the nomenclature, and in any case, an inheritance from the romantics with whom it all started.

JR:Two points then: first, my pursuit of a kind of transcultural or global poetics: a poetry rooted in its place but capable of crossing borders and languages to become a virtual omnipoetics. And secondly my progress from deep image to ethnopoetics to a kind of poetry of witness or testimony – not as others would have it or define it but as I would. I could say a lot about both of these points – and will or have elsewhere – but suffice it that a book like this gives me a retrospective view, maybe more than a comparable selection of poems previously picked for publication. My next project – or one of them – will be a large reader or sampler of my own work, dating from the 1950s to the present and including poetics and performance as well as poems as such. The editor or co-editor for this is the Mexican poet Heriberto Yépez, who recently edited and translated a large book of my prose writings, OjodelTestimonio, for Editorial Aldus in Mexico. That said, I suppose that I’ve now reached an age of retrospection, which is interesting enough as far as it goes – as long as I can move the work around or recompose it as a whole – but also a little unnerving.

ABOUT POEMS AND POETICS: In this age of internet and blog the possibility opens of a free circulation of works (poems and poetics in the present instance) outside of any commercial or academic nexus. I will therefore be posting work of my own, both new & old, that may otherwise be difficult or impossible to access, and I will also, from time to time, post work by others who have been close to me, in the manner of a freewheeling on-line anthology or magazine. I take this to be in the tradition of autonomous publication by poets, going back to Blake and Whitman and Dickinson, among numerous others.

Technicians of the Sacred, August 2017Expanded Fiftieth Anniversary EditionUniversity of California Press

* The index below is organized chronoloigally, starting with a post from May 20, 2012, when Poems and Poetics first appeared in Jacket2. Earlier posts in the series, going back to 2008, may be found at Poems and Poetics.